Historical background of USA

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PRE-COLONIAL AMERICA

Before Europeans set foot on the American continent, complex cultures flourished in different parts of the Americas. Those peoples varied enormously, ranging from poor nomadic food gatherers of the interior plains of North America to opulent fishing societies of the Pacific North-West, from the woodland hunting tribes of what is now the northern United States to the wealthy and powerful peoples of Central America. Together they constituted somewhere between fifty and one hundred million people, of which about ten million lived in North America. Many areas in the western hemisphere contained denser populations than regions of Western Europe in the age of Christopher Columbus. America was not "a vacant wasteland" awaiting the arrival of "civilized Europeans".

Across the continent, from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard, lived groups of interrelated cultures. Speaking such languages as Siouxan, Algonquian, and Iroquoisan, they formed complicated societies that often differed markedly from one another. Relying upon agriculture, as well as on fishing, hunting and trapping, the peoples of the Eastern Woodlands built stable villages, some of them with as many as five thousand inhabitants. Living either in birch-covered wigwams or in rectangular longhouses, they usually palisaded their villages with long stockades. They also possessed, in their light birch-bark canoes, a reliable means of commerce and communication with other tribes.

The chiefdoms of the Pacific Northwest were blessed with an incredibly rich environment based on the vast stock offish, especially salmon, and abundant edible plants. The large succulent fish annually made their way upstream to spawn and then return to the sea, and the indigenous peoples learned to make nets and, weirs to harvest this crop. The natives of the region also developed techniques to preserve their fish, thus assuring sufficient food in seasons of scarcity. The natural abundance encouraged the formation of a sedentary society even though agriculture remained generally undeveloped in this region.

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Although intrepid Norsemen skirted the New World's Northern shore about A. D. 1000, the news of their discovery remained veiled in the mist of Viking sagas for centuries. The Americas were not visited again until 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas. North America was at first considered nothing but a vast, maddening obstacle between spice-hungry Europe and the riches of the Orient. For 150 years it remained largely unsettled by Europeans. During that time, however, Spanish adventurers roamed Florida, the gulf coast, and the Southwest in -a vain search for treasure. French voyageurs braved the Canadian wilderness in pursuit of furs, and Dutch and Swedish traders established small outposts on the Northeast coast in present-day New York and Delaware.

The English, too, came looking for easy riches. In December 1606, a London Company sent a group of settlers on board three ships to colonize the North American territory called Virginia. They reached the New World in May 1607 and founded Jamestown, which became the first permanent English settlement on the American continent.

The most well-described in all history books is probably the landing of the "Mayflower" in November 1620. Instead of reaching the mouth of the Hudson River, battered off course by Atlantic storms, the sturdy little ship approached the Massachusetts coast and anchored in Plymouth harbor.